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Proposal: Measure air quality in known traffic bottleneck areas

What effect does traffic congestion have on the environment. Automogile emissions are measurable, I propose a study to measue the effects in known conjested highways (and highway intersections , find the peek rush hours, coordinate ariel photos to count motor vehicles passing through target areas, and lastly report and revisit. Make suggestions for improvement.

Comment

Good idea. Right now, states are trying to minimize monitoring of pollution. The pm at interstate highways is about 10 mcg/m3 higher per Maine monitoring, but no one wants to monitor that. Also,the intent of the clean air act is to keep pm and pollution below standards "ANYWHERE", like at houses engulfed in wood smoke, which is 1/3 of the houses more or less in northern states.

The C-FERST program is great. Regional monitoring is much better. Add regional modeling like PE Huntley and others did in NY and you find 25 mcg/m3 pm2.5 from wood smoke added to historic pm from oil and gas combustion which is 25 mcg/m3. That's right. The monitoring system is 100% off !!! Add pm from an ave stove at 25 mcg/m3 to 100 mcg/m3 and you see where the real problem is that no one wants to deal with. So model woodburning equipment like incinersators to make sure pm and the tox equivalent of 180 air toxics is regulated which is one of the purposes of the EPA and the NSPS stds.

The small source pollution from cars added to a major category in the past, but wood smoke is now much worse. The OMB policy of only regulating small sources is very bad and needs to be changed since wood smoke adds $150 billion health care costs to the victims. Major Fleming from the Surgeon General Office said wood smoke health nuisances are a big problem but it is easy to manage and stop and prevent as required. Costs saved will outweigh costs incurred and economic multipliers apply so effort will MAKE MONEY. Make money, save lives, reduce global warming from carbon black soot. Worth doing.

Comment

The important question to ask is what affect does traffic congestion have on us. I think an underlying problem is that the environmental marketing message is incorrect. The message of "environmentally friendly" misses the "why"? We need to connect sustainability to human health. The meassage of "save the planet" allows people to separate themselves from it (as strange as that sounds). The planet will survive fine without us. We need to more stongly connect a healthy environment to human health.